Well, That Explains That Particular Delusion

Over the past few years, Tesla has increasingly pulled hardware from its self-driving systems, and has made little, if any, progress toward its goal, and its claim, of full self driving.

It now appears that Tesla has dozens (hundreds?) of employees whose job is to make sure that Elon's trips and those of his buddies get personally curated driving tweaks.

If you know the route, and throw significant resources to pre-program for the peculiarities those routes, you can make it seem that FSD works, even when it does not.

Tesla's self-driving cars seem like a marvel of machine learning.

But in reality, the company relies on a small army of human "data annotators" who continuously improve how the cars drive by reviewing camera footage from thousands of Tesla drivers and teaching the vehicle how to behave like a human driver, like deciding when it's appropriate to use a blinker or identifying a construction cone.

Business Insider has learned that those annotators focus their efforts on two high-profile categories of drivers: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a select set of "VIP" drivers.

BI spoke with over a dozen current and former Tesla employees, all but one who spoke on condition of anonymity, who said images and video clips from Musk's Teslas received meticulous scrutiny, while data from high-profile drivers like YouTubers received "VIP" treatment in identifying and addressing issues with the Full Self-Driving software. The result is that Tesla's Autopilot and FSD software may better navigate routes taken by Musk and other high-profile drivers, making their rides smoother and more straightforward.

That means, experts say, Tesla's resources are being unevenly distributed and could serve as a distraction toward the company's larger mission of truly autonomous driving. 

Think about the business culture here, Tesla is sabotaging what it considers to be its most important effort in order to keep the boss from knowing that his program is failing.

This is a text-book example of a bad boss and a dysfunctional organization.